Interrupting Liberal Victory week to celebrate my dirty old manhood.

More on the victories won by the liberal agenda over the past fifty years tomorrow. Let's instead focus on women with attractive faces and amazingly large breasts.

I knew that would get your attention.

The Huffington Post is absolutely obsessed with Christina Hendricks, the very busty redheaded actress who plays the office manager Joan Holloway Harris on the AMC show Mad Men, but they are not the only website happy to talk about her. Popeater.com ran a poll asking women of they would rather look like Ms. Hendricks or famously thin model Kate Moss, and also asked men who they would rather ogle. While the results are completely non-scientific, women preferred the voluptuary over the mannequin by a ratio of 3 to 1, while men would rather look at Christina instead of Kate by a margin of 5 to 1.

The obvious problem with this poll is the false dichotomy. Ms. Hendricks is naturally busty and weighs a lot more than the average actress today, but she is reality. Kate Moss is also reality, a very thin girl who has nearly no breasts. The choice presented today is between reality and fantasy. The other choice is some woman liposucked to within an inch of her life while she carries five pounds of plastic gel packs on her chest. The silly standard today is the unreality of Playboy models and Carrie Prejean, and I only hope the backlash against them continues.

As for Christina vs. Kate, I find myself in the vast majority. Besides her astounding body, Ms. Hendricks has the face of an angel and a voice that can turn a grown man's knees into melted butter.

I mean this only in the nicest possible way.


It was nearly three years ago I wrote a blog post about Joy Harmon, a 1960s starlet who is the main attraction in Village of the Giants, a movie of deep significance to My People in furtherance of Our Agenda. Ms. Harmon had a facial structure like Julie Christie's, with big beautiful wide set blue eyes and a luscious mouth, but Joy was also one of those big busted blondes in the style of Mamie Van Doren and June Wilkinson. In the dance scene from Village of the Giants, the camera spends a lot of time with her breasts and torso in the middle of the frame, and I have never heard one negative comment from a fan of giant women about the extra pounds she was carrying by today's standards.

I'm glad to see people openly praise Christina Hendricks for standing against the trend of crazy thinness in the entertainment industry today, but she shouldn't be turned into the new standard that must be met. Not one in a hundred women are going to be built like Christina or Joy in their respective primes, and women who aren't so naturally endowed but want to be end up looking like strippers or more specifically, like Pamela Anderson and Heidi Montag. If something positive can happen from this swing back on the pendulum, someone somewhere will remember that our mammalian brains equate a healthy softness in young women with fertility, which is kind of the whole evolutionary point, if memory serves.

Liberal victory week continues:Reproductive rights

In 1879, the state of Connecticut passed a law banning the sale of any drug or device used for the purpose of preventing conception. It was on the books for decades and nearly never enforced until the 1960s when The Pill was invented. Doctors tried suing on behalf of their patients, but the courts said the doctors lacked standing to sue. In a 1961 case Poe v. Ullman, the court decided not to hear the case, but Justice Harlan dissented. The most famous quote from his dissent is as follows.

"...the full scope of the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause cannot be found in or limited by the precise terms of the specific guarantees elsewhere provided in the Constitution. This 'liberty' is not a series of isolated points pricked out in terms of the taking of property; the freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures; and so on. It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints."

A few years later, Estelle Griswold of Connecticut Planned Parenthood and Dr. C. Lee Buxton of Yale opened a clinic in New Haven to test the law once again. They were arrested, tried and found guilty and fined $100 each. Clearly, they now had standing and the case went to the Supreme Court, who struck down the statute. In the 7-2 ruling, even those who dissented called the Connecticut law "uncommonly silly". Griswold established the right of married couples to buy contraceptives in Connecticut. A 1972 ruling in Eisenstadt v. Baird gave the same rights to unmarried couples, using 14th Amendment rights of equal protection under the law.

Conservative scholars hate Griswold, and point to it as judicial activism. When you listen to our new army of "strict constitutional constructionalists" who listen to Glenn Beck and other ignorant pinheads, it's clear they think the government isn't allowed to do much of anything, using convoluted logic that makes the establishment of the right to privacy look pristine and direct in comparison.

We see in the Park 51 controversy the true colors of these sons and daughters of liberty. They accept the rights of others, but they want those rights to be trumped if any uninvolved party takes offense to the exercise of those rights. They want a weak and toothless government until such time as they want to use government to abrogate the rights of people to whom conservatives object. They claim to love liberty, but they keep courting bigotry and intolerance, hoarding liberty for themselves and denying it to people who aren't "real Americans".

They won't go away easily; they may never go away completely. But it's obvious who believes in the rights of all citizens and who believes those rights only belong to people the easily aroused mob finds unobjectionable.

Liberal victory week continues:The dismantling of the obscenity laws

We often hear the critics of the current administration talking about "taking our country back", which implies that the people running it today don't deserve it, despite winning in a landslide. There is also an implication that the country does NOT belong to the winners of the election, that the REAL America got gypped in 2008 just because their guy got about 10 million less votes than That Guy and missed getting an electoral majority by 97 electors.

A fair question to be asked when they want to take "their country back" is, exactly how far back? There is a nostalgia for the good old days felt by a lot of people who weren't there during the good old days or who have very bad memories.

Let me be honest and say I'm old enough to have been there. Let me be immodest and say my memory is much better than most.

Many people decry the crudeness of our society, and I would not argue that point. My point is that we have gained in freedom and made a more just society, but that did not come without a cost. I am glad to live in a country where you can't be arrested for buying or selling a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover or Tropic of Cancer. When I was a boy, there were places where that was against the law.


Censorship against the written word had been going on for a very long time, but when I was a kid the battle went from print to performance. While some of the Beat Poets were harassed by the law, one of the first performers known to the general public as a threat to the public morals for having a dirty mouth was Lenny Bruce. He had been a comic for quite a while, working in burlesque houses and nightclubs. There are old recordings of his act on TV, and his stuff was both clean and stale, the usual uninspired collection of mother-in-law jokes. But his nightclub act began to extend into what we now call observational humor, with lots of observations about sex where using dirty words was close to mandatory. Swearing in a nightclub act wasn't completely unheard of, but most "blue" comics told dirty jokes with a minimum of actual obscenities. Bruce crossed that line, and did so frequently. All around the country, police departments and district attorneys decided that he had to be arrested if he said those things in a nightclub, as though he had a bullhorn and was swearing in front of a schoolhouse or church. He was first arrested in 1961 in San Francisco, the first of many arrests around the country. He would not compromise on his act, hoping to be the vanguard, but he did not have the strength for it. He was tried for obscenity and lost in 1964. He died in 1966, ruined by drugs and a well-founded feeling of persecution.



If I may use a religious comparison sure to offend, Bruce was John the Baptist, paving the way for the one who would come. That young man actually was in the audience one night when Bruce was arrested. He told the police he did not believe in government-issued IDs, a position that should endear him to many Tea Party stalwarts. He was arrested and taken to jail with Bruce in the same vehicle. His name was George Carlin.

Carlin was actually still a clean-cut kid whose act was perfectly acceptable to Ed Sullivan when Bruce was still alive, but within a few years he took a left turn, started dressing like a hippie and letting his beard and hair grow. It was six years after Bruce died that Carlin was arrested yet again, this time for performing live in Milwaukee one of his most famous routines, The Seven Words You Can't Say On Television. Here is the famous preamble to that clarion call to freedom.

"There are seven words you can't say on television: Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits. Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that'll infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war."

Between 1964 and 1972, America underwent massive changes. In the earlier trial in New York, a three judge panel threw the book at Lenny Bruce and sentenced him to jail time in a workhouse. He was still free on bail with the conviction being appealed when he died. In 1972 in Milwaukee, the judge at the Carlin case decided his work was indecent but Carlin had the right to say it as long as he caused no public disturbance.

Carlin's comedy album also changed the airwaves. A father was listening with his son to Pacifica radio's WBAI in New York when the Seven Words skit was broadcast over the air. The man sued and the case went to the Supreme Court. The 5-4 decision was that routine was "indecent but not obscene" and the F.C.C. had the right to ban it at hours when children would be likely to listen. This meant that late night radio could be much more free.

It is true that the world has become more crass because of this, but free speech is meaningless if no one takes offense. If entertainment offends you, don't watch or don't listen. For me, American False Idol is a disgusting obscenity even if no one says anything more coarse than "Gosh!" On the other hand, I like it when Peggy Olson on Mad Men says "chickenshit" and means it.



Some localities still try to block stuff, but the Internet is hard to control. The greatest song of the Summer of 2010 is currently available only on The You Tubes, Cee Lo Green's infectiously catchy and upbeat new tune called Fuck You!

This is because liberals stood up for free speech when conservatives tried as hard as they could to deny it. When these self-professed rodeo clowns say they love the constitution, it's a still a pretty good bet that they don't.

Liberal victory week begins:Ending the draft

I saw a Gallup poll taken in 2009 that states only about 20% of Americans now self-identify as liberal, with 40% self-identified as conservative and 35% as moderate. I'm guessing the last 5% consider themselves Sandinista like my good buddy Padre Mickey. Party affiliations are much closer, with Democrats often in the lead as they were in 2008 when Obama crushed McCain. Party affiliation and position on the political spectrum aside, let it always be remembered that John McCain ran one of the worst campaigns for president in the last fifty years, showing less competence than George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis or Bob Dole, other candidates to took serious electoral ass-whuppings.

Now, the conservative movement thinks of themselves as the standard bearers of "liberty" and "freedom", which in their mind means paying lower taxes. I'm old enough to remember when freedom was the cause of liberals, and freedom meant "not getting your ass thrown in jail for no good cause". Many of the battles for freedom started in my lifetime, and time after time, people who self-identified as conservatives were against freedom and they got their asses kicked like the miserable cowardly dogs that they are.

A lot of young people didn't live through it, but I did. I had some personal stake in some of the changes that took place and nearly none in others, but that doesn't change the facts. Life in these United States is better for all our citizens because of the courage of liberal heroes who stood up against conservative villains.


I start this week of history lessons with one of the most remarkable and hard to predict victories of all, the end of the military draft. The United States has had a draft since the Civil War and there have always been people who complained. It was a real issue during World War I, when there were a lot of people in the country who were against foreign entanglements and didn't see the sinking of the Lusitania as provocation enough to enter a horrible slaughter thousands of miles away. The anti-draft movement of World War II and Korea were much less pronounced, but during Vietnam, it was a real political issue that divided the country along left-right lines.


One of the most vivid signs of that split was how people felt about Muhammad Ali, the heavyweight boxing champion who converted to the Black Muslims and claimed his religion allowed him to be a conscientious objector. Ali was deeply hated by a large segment of the population, so much so that Joe Frazier, a man who had to struggle against a racist system as well, was cast as an Uncle Tom because so many white scumbags pinned their hopes on him to beat Ali, since anyone with half a brain knew that there wasn't a white heavyweight who had a chance in hell of beating the mouthy and supremely talented boxer and showman.

Men who stood against the draft were seen as cowards, but they faced jail or exile for their beliefs, and quite simply, their argument that the draft was an infringement on their freedom was undeniable. The government could force them into a low paying and exceedingly hazardous job or throw them in jail. In the sixties, there didn't seem to be an alternative to the draft, but as about a half century has now gone by, we can say the draft protesters of the 1960s helped make life better for the generations that followed them, aided by two unlikely allies, the military itself and Richard Nixon.

The military has never liked the draft. Men forced into uniform don't make particularly good soldiers, and in Vietnam, they became a serious threat to the military structure with the not common but still troubling act of fragging. Fragging was slang for enlisted men seriously wounding or killing officers they disliked, named for the fragmentation grenade often used. The military brass knew the problem was draftees and cracking down on discipline would likely make matters worse. Nixon, for as much as he was reviled by liberals then (and now), was a very keen politician who understood that victories did not have to be the crushing of your opponents, but instead might work if you took a major issue away from your opponents. During his administration, the first steps were taken that turned the draft into a lottery which has since been effectively discontinued. The military lobbied hard to increase our military budget so steeply that we could field a smaller and exceedingly well equipped volunteer army to fight any war short of World War III without a draft, even when fighting two long wars today, started when conservative pinheads and military shirkers George W. Bush and Dick Cheney began two conflicts they had no idea how to end.

The end of the draft had a direct impact on my life. My dad was drafted and fought in Korea. He hated it deeply and instructed my brother in ways to make sure the Army rejected him when his time came. Even the lottery was discontinued when my time came and I could stay in school without worrying about it.

The people who fought hardest for this issue were liberals. Those who opposed change were, as usual, conservatives. We won and they lost. This is a steady, consistent pattern of the last half century and there are battles still to be fought or yet to be finished.

More tomorrow.

Anyone get a mars hoax e-mail?

I used to be an e-mail forwarder, but well... the nineties are over, right? I was wandering around the Internets today and I stumbled on this e-mail story that none of my friends who still forward e-mails sent to me. This is a good thing because I would have a hard time staying polite at something with this level of Rock F*#king Stupidity.

There is an e-mail that says Mars will look as large as the Moon some time in August. Tell your friends, tell your children and grandchildren, tattoo the dog, burn an offering and give it to the gods, big big party and you are all invited.

Of course it isn't true, not even close. The math is easy. The radius of Mars is about twice the radius of the Moon, which means if they were the same distance away from the earth, Mars would look to be four times the surface area because the area is proportional to the square of the radius. If Mars was twice as far away, then the two would look to be the same size.

Mars isn't twice as far away as the moon, it's much, much farther away even at its closest. The Moon is about a quarter million miles away. At its closest, Mars is about 60 million miles away. So even when Mars is really close, the Moon is more than 200 times closer.

If someone sends this to you, you have my permission to call bullshit on it. This e-mail has been sent every August for the past six or seven years and scientists are trying to get the word out. It's not working very well. We have these small weak levees of education trying to hold back an angry and rising sea of stupidity.

Random 10, 8/27/10

007 (Shanty Town) Desmond Dekker
Days Elvis Costello
Exodus Bob Marley and the Wailers
Semaphore Signals Wreckless Eric
It Hurts Me Too Eric Clapton
Pressure Drop Toots and the Maytals
Se Tu M'ami (Parisotti) Cecilia Bartoli
Christmas Must Be Tonight The Band
Biology Joe Jackson
Spiderwebs No Doubt

I have my doubts that the random selection process in the iTunes on my Mac would actually pass muster if checked for randomness. I might have a total of twenty reggae tunes on my computer out of 1,200 songs and three of them show up this morning.

Not complaining, just sayin'.

Hey, Abe! Buddy! You gotta little sumthin'...ya know, sumthin' froggy on your face there.

No, not there... over a little to the right. Okay, yeah, now you got it.

Pointy headed scientists are congratulating themselves on the discovery of what they assume to be the smallest species of amphibian outside of the Americas. They have given the new species the name Microhyla nepenthicola, which is Latin for "really tiny frog we overlooked a few times". The creatures had been found before, but earlier biologists made the assumption that these were juveniles, li'l baby froglets that would grow into normal sized critters over time. Turns out this is normal sized for them.

Da itty bitty froggies! Dey so CUUUUUUUTE!


The real reason for the species name for da itty bitty froggies is that they were found living in the puddle of water inside a pitcher plant named Nepenthes ampullaria, a type of carnivorous plant found in Borneo, sweet Borneo*! Other critters fall into these puddles and get trapped and die, and the pitcher plant then lives on the nutrients from the rotting remains. The little froggies are so small that the inside of the pitcher plant is not some claustrophobic death trap, but instead a lovely luxury resort.

Isn't nature wonderful, and by wonderful, I mean goofy? Go figure.

*My sister Karlacita! will know where that is taken from.